China Has Withheld Samples of a Dangerous Flu Virus (nytimes.com) 239
For over a year, the Chinese government has withheld lab samples of a rapidly evolving influenza virus from the United States -- specimens needed to develop vaccines and treatments, according to federal health officials, The New York Times reports. From the story: Despite persistent requests from government officials and research institutions, China has not provided samples of the dangerous virus, a type of bird flu called H7N9 [Editor's note: the link maybe paywalled; alternative source]. In the past, such exchanges have been mostly routine under rules established by the World Health Organization. Now, as the United States and China spar over trade, some scientists worry that the vital exchange of medical supplies and information could slow, hampering preparedness for the next biological threat. The scenario is "unlike shortages in aluminum and soybeans," said Dr. Michael Callahan, an infectious disease specialist at Harvard Medical School. "Jeopardizing U.S. access to foreign pathogens and therapies to counter them undermines our nation's ability to protect against infections which can spread globally within days." Experts concur that the world's next global pandemic will likely come from a repeat offender: the flu. The H7N9 virus is one candidate.
Don't worry, the Great Negotiator will get it (Score:2, Funny)
Just like his great negotiating skills have gotten Affordable Healthcare repealed, even with a majority in both the House and Senate.
And The Wall.
ayup.
First line could use editing (Score:5, Informative)
The line "For over a year, the Chinese government has withheld lab samples of a rapidly evolving influenza virus from the United States" says the virus comes from the United States. What they mean is "For over a year, the Chinese government has withheld from the United States lab samples of a rapidly evolving influenza virus."
Re:First line could use editing (Score:5, Funny)
"For over a year, the Chinese government has withheld lab samples of an influenza virus from a rapidly evolving threat, the United States."
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"For over a year, the Chinese government has withheld lab samples of an influenza virus from a rapidly evolving threat, the United States."
This could be interpreted as saying that the US *is* the rapidly evolving threat, and that the Chinese are withholding lab samples from it (the US, the rapidly evolving thread.)
No matter what, that line is FUBAR. It needs to be nuked from orbit ("it's the only way to be sure") and start from scratch.
"For over a year, the Chinese government has withheld from the United States lab samples of an influenza virus that might constitute a rapidly evolving threat."
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Nonsense. The Evangelicals and Trump have never evolved. They were made by G-d in His image. I guess even G-d makes mistakes. Maybe he'll get some mulligans like Trump gets when he cheats at golf.
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"For over a year, the Chinese government has withheld lab samples of an influenza virus from a rapidly evolving threat, the Trump Administration of the United States."
There, fixed that for you.
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The most reasonable way to deal with this then is to locate some sick Chinese farmers, offer them transport and state of the art medical care in the US, et voila!
We get samples of the virus and the farmers hopefully get well on US soil. It would be a nice touch to offer them asylum also afterwards.
Bullshit Windy (Score:2)
in Asia - 766 cases were reported, almost all in China
So ask the countries that weren't China for their samples.
How about the rest of your silly claims
It's the main flu virus for the year...and it's 40% fatal. Lets check here [webmd.com]. 5-20% of Americans get the flu each year. Lets assume its the same for China. so 5-20% of Chinese people get it and it's 40% fatal. So 2% - 8% of the population, 28 million to 112 million Chinese people, died from f
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Not of this particular H7N9 strain! See e.g. this comment of mine [slashdot.org] on how strains of the same subtype change and can become drastically more lethal, as seen in 1918 and in the recent pandemic, all H1N1 strains.
And while you're commended for "doing the math", you need to use pandemic infection rates to get the high end of possible deaths, not just normal flu season ones which represent the low end. Then apply a r
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Plus wild guesswork, which is often wrong, i.e it was mostly so for the prevalent circulating A strain or strains in the last season's Northern hemisphere vaccine. The 6 months is to create new seed strains if needed, and to produce millions of doses in the old fashioned way with eggs, max 3 doses per egg ... and for the elderly, they're now preferring to use 4 times the normal dosage to better insure a sufficient immu
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Not too many chickens fly from China to Mainland America.
In fact, no birds that I knew of fly from China to Mainland America.
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Just like the 1918, 1976 (Ford's swine flu), 1977 (best guess from a Russian biolab), and 2009 H1N1 strains were "the same exact shit"? And the annual Northern hemisphere vaccine strains were Brisbane/59/2007 before the 2009 pandemic, then for it and many following yea [wikipedia.org]
Why didn't the US discover this, too? (Score:2)
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Different strands of virus mutate in different parts of the world. China could have found a strand of virus and is not sharing. Hopefully they don't "share" it with us in an unfortunate way. I don't think they're doing this, I just think it's a "I'm getting back at you" kinda thing.
Re:Why didn't the US discover this, too? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is NOT good.
Re:Why didn't the US discover this, too? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Why didn't the US discover this, too? (Score:5, Interesting)
started? (Score:2)
started
most human infections were in people who'd had contact with live poultry or visited markets where the birds were sold.
Why not read the article instead of relying on your 'secret sources'
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On a side note, back when reagan got in and was screaming about Herpes, we
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GregMmm - thanks for the insight.
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What are the odds the inoculations would be any more effective than the zillions of ones made with expired ingredients manufactured by those two PRC companies that are now posing one of the greatest threats to Emperor Xi's reign?
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Why would it take 6 months when you could just buy 1 dose from China and copy that instead?
Heck, sneak in and steal a sample, bribe a Chinese person to get one for you. You claim it's going to be worth 10's to 100's of Billions of dollars, you want to save hundreds of millions of American lives. So slip a 'researcher' a 20 and have a sample tomorrow. It's not like Chinese pharmaceutical companies are well known for their integrity. [latimes.com]
Or are you just anti-China fear mongering again with this?
Or the world could just pay CHina $100-1000 / person for an inoculation.
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A dose of vaccine doesn't get you much that's useful. It should contain two proteins, the HA and NA surface ones, you'd have to "decompile" them, produce DNA sequences that would code for them, use the reverse genetics approach [wikipedia.org] to get the DNA into flu strains optimized to grow in eggs, or insect cells in bioreactors for the Protein Solutions approach (and I know some other companies were working on similar modern app
Walls (Score:5, Funny)
What we need is more walls to keep the birds from flying into this country and spreading flu.
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Not to split hairs, but could he just open his mouth like during a campaign speech? He's not stopped giving those so we could just plant him in California and face him west.
A super-spy could retrieve the virus (Score:5, Funny)
This sounds like a job for James Bond [theonion.com].
Lol (Score:2)
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It's the PRC that's never, ever played nice with the rest of the world when it comes to infectious diseases, historically one of their most consequential exports, e.g. the Black Death. Look at SARS in 2002 for an archetypal example.
In this case, per the fine article, the PRC has been withholding samples for "over a year", i.e. before the start of the trade war. Because this is a propaganda piece attack
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Wait... (Score:3)
...you're suggesting that perhaps China is a SHITTY international actor, whose interests lie solely with its own people and geopolitical goals? /shock.
For all of you who think Pax Americana has been odious and oppressive, brace yourselves. You haven't the faintest idea what it's going to be like with a TRULY racist, TRULY self-interested, TRULY ethnocentric hegemon.
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It was Europe that spread the bulk of slavery around the world.
To be fair, slavery was all over the world, just localized.
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Meh. Just look at history.
It was Europe that spread the bulk of slavery around the world.
With over a billion people and with several "racial" groups of its own to subjugate, to date China has been able to produce all the slaves it needs right at home. Automation is replacing slavery with people starving in the streets anyway. These days, China is known less for forced labor and more for organlegging [nytimes.com]. If you cause trouble, they break you up for parts.
Easy Fix (Score:2)
Dissallow Chinese nationals from entering your country and prevent any travel to / from Mainland China until they decide to share their samples.
Until they provide said samples, their citizens ( and any tourists ) are basically transmission vectors.
TBH, scientific research that benefits the species as a whole really should play on a different playground than Politics and petty bickering.
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Agreed.... Every nation should implement this border control ASAP.
Any nation that conceals or refuses to join a mutual relationship sharing data, samples, etc about any active pathogens or vaccine data with all nations/health agencies requesting should have a restriction against travel through other countries until the situation is remedied.
China withheld samples of influenza virus? (Score:2)
You would blame Trump of course (Score:2)
But the problem 100% is with China for this shitty move. Look at USSR USA cooperation in space.
China is worse than Trump
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Hell, look at USA and Russian cooperation on the last U.S. election. Who says they cannot get along?
H7N9 avian flu viruses brought into Japan via ille (Score:2)
Re:So this is how Trump wind up destroying the wor (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, don't be so dramatic. Sure, China won't share the specimens with us, but all we have to do is get one of our friends to ask for it....
Oh, wait.
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Exactly this ... the US is pissing off friends and allies all over the place. And while most of them probably wouldn't withhold medical stuff, America has fewer friends these days they can count on ... because those friends are tired of being blamed for everything by the Cheeto in Chief.
I'm not actually surprised that China has said "fuck you" and decided not to play nicely.
I won't be surprised if other countries decide similar thing
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The USA has not friends, at least in the current US diplomatic climate, only frenemies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] and it will abuse any relationship for practically any reason, ego, greed, domination, have to repeat that one cause they said it out aloud, 'DOMINATION', yeah, friends don't dominate friends because we they do, they ain't friends and never have been.
The US lies so much, that well, people have stopped paying attention and working to reduce interaction to only when they have to. It's lik
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The US when Obama was president didn't ask nicely from 2013 to 2016? No one else in the world has asked the PRC nicely? The Europeans for example also make flu vaccines, some of their firms are the biggest in the world at doing that, like France's Sanofi. When looking for US seed strain producing labs, I also noted there are 1 or more in the U.K.
And producing seed strains now is one of the most importa
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I don't believe it is Trump causing the friends of the U.S. to think twice, it is the fact that a significant portion of the U.S. electorate support el Presidente Tweetie that has them concerned. They now realize just how stupid the U.S. electorate can be and that problem is not going be fixed soon. There's no fixing stupid (to reuse a Ron White phrase).
Re:China engaging in passive biowarfaire (Score:5, Interesting)
Not really, Ebola, like this bird flue, is zoonotic, it's not adapted to us humans and kills us way too fast to spread widely and quickly, especially with minimum levels of isolation that e.g. Nigeria was capable of implementing.
A bird flu like this might be much worse, though, since it's spread by aerosols ... but it also might no be as easily caught by humans ... except if the PRC is doing their usual thing of trying to sweep cases under the rug, they're giving it a chance to adapt better to humans (e.g. hybridization when a human or pig gets both it and a normal to them strain of the flu), although that could decrease its lethality.
Re:China engaging in passive biowarfaire (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, Ebola and flu are both zoonoses, but they are not obligately so. The majority of cases are due to human to human transmission. That's pretty much the template for an emergent infectious disease: they don't come from nowhere. They smolder away slowly in some isolated animal population for millennia, then suddenly hop onto a human migration path.
That's what happened to smallpox, which was an insignificant African rodent disease until around three thousand years ago, when evidence emerges for it in Egyptian human populations. Egyptian traders brought it into the Near East and possibly as far as India by 1500 years ago; by the 1st Century CE it was in China. Then a particularly virulent strain emerged in China a few centuries later. This kind of thing happens all the time in nature, but the more aggressive strain burns itself out. The difference here is that China had extensive trade connections that reached as far west as Rome and east to Melanesia, giving the more aggressive strain global scope. In the 8th cenutry it killed 1/3 of the population of Japan. From late Roman times to the middle ages it made periodic incursions into Europe, but only became endemic there after the Crusades.
Human trade tilts the evolutionary playing field in favor of aggressive infectious agents. Ebola never spread anywhere before 1976, but it must have been around. It just never had access to a network of cities with hundreds of thousands of people as it did in '76. When it took weeks to travel between villages or to cross the ocean, Ebola was never going anywhere. Today you can catch Ebola in the African bush and be in New York two days later, well before any symptoms emerge.
So while Ebola isn't something we should panic over, it's not an empty bogeyman either. The US needs forward defenses against such things, because Ebola is not the only one.
Re:China engaging in passive biowarfaire (Score:5, Interesting)
That's because we had so few cases (most in fact health workers evacuated from Africa, right? Was there even more than 1 secondary in the US?) we could actually treat them in the dozen or less beds in the 3 of the 4 facilities that can do this (the 4th was reserved for any healthcare workers in the first 3 who contracted it, which fortunately didn't happen).
If it gets dire in a First World country, you do essentially what the Third World does, pretend to treat it but isolate it, and let the chips fall where they may. Although as we're discovering, survivors can transmit for a long time, so we'd have to get even more strict with quarantine measures.
The point is that, while it wasn't "routine" (except this sort of thing actually is routine in Africa), it wasn't The Big One, more people get killed in a normal flu season, let alone a pandemic one. Because, you know, Ebola is not transmitted by aerosol.
A pandemic that's more like 1918, or worse, is what we're trying to forestall, with the PRC not cooperating at all for the last 5 years. Obviously because they knew Trump would be elected 3 years after it started breaking out in the PRC.
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So you don't know that Americans can't actually do that "simply"? It's theoretically possible in "encouraged" sectors, requires a local "partner" for "restricted" sectors, and then there are the "forbidden" ones. With such a transparent motive, I can't imagine it being simple, but a quick check tells us that there are some.
But you're ignoring the whole point of the article, if you wait until i
Re:So this is how Trump wind up destroying the wor (Score:5, Interesting)
The PRC has never "played well with others" when it comes to infectious diseases, their first instinct is to claim nothing is happening, see SARS, they exclude the ROC (Taiwan) from as much of the international health network as they can, it's what you expect from a government were politics trumps (heh) everything else, especially including human lives. They don't much care if they kill their own Han Chinese by the tens of millions, why would even they care about foreign devils?
If, as you claim, they're doing this to spite Trump, that just further proves that they always put politics ahead of human lives.
Re:So this is how Trump wind up destroying the wor (Score:4, Insightful)
The PRC has never "played well with others" when it comes to infectious diseases, their first instinct is to claim nothing is happening, see SARS, they exclude the ROC (Taiwan) from as much of the international health network as they can, it's what you expect from a government were politics trumps (heh) everything else, especially including human lives. They don't much care if they kill their own Han Chinese by the tens of millions, why would even they care about foreign devils?
If, as you claim, they're doing this to spite Trump, that just further proves that they always put politics ahead of human lives.
Although it is true that the PRC has never really played nice with others (I do remember the SARS kerfuffle), it does not refute the fact that this ridiculous trade war is making a bad situation worse.
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For the PRC and our betters in the US, this has nothing to do with science, medicine, avoiding the possible deaths of 100s of millions to billions of lives, etc., the alpha and omega is politics. The usual stuff the PRC has always done with infectious diseases like SARS, and TDS here.
Re:So this is how Trump wind up destroying the wor (Score:5, Informative)
Citation needed, seeing as how per the report the withholding started before the trade war. If they've been doing it for 5 years as others have claimed, you ought to be blaming Obama for starting it.
In the chinese calendar it's (Score:5, Funny)
it's the year of the Twelve monkeys
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Re: So this is how Trump wind up destroying the wo (Score:2, Interesting)
That is stupid. When the Chinese government falls it will be to a Chinese who becomes popular by blaming the existing Chinese government for it's failures, real or otherwise.
#butheremails
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More likely than your conspiracy imagination is that the many flus start in S. China where contact between humans and animals is less than sterile...pigs and chickens. The PRC, knowing they have no real legitimacy, is reluctant to allow that sort of bad press come out if they can avoid it. The fact that those diseases could kill millions never enters into the calculation.
And they aren't worried about invasion. Japan cannot and wouldn't want China. Russia cannot even manage their own country. There is no one
Re:So this is how Trump wind up destroying the wor (Score:4, Interesting)
Do you have any reason to believe we wouldn't?
My Google and Bing fu wasn't good enough to find anything about this, but I can't recall ever hearing of such a case, we can be sure the usual suspects would scream about it, and there's also the minor detail that mainland China has been one of the biggest sources for novel diseases. Which has been true for a very long time, e.g. the Black Death is thought to have come from China.
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Heh, I don't think Russia or the US would cough those up, certainly not without a very good reason. But I don't think you really need them, the DNA has been sequenced and published (and that was controversial of course), it's thought to be not terribly hard to recreate from that, certainly for a reasonably advanced nation state. One reason after 9/11 we got ourselves back into position to inoculate every one in the country if it broke out.
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You must be new here.
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Yeah, all those comments Trump made during the campaign about how he was going to screw China? Mere noise that China could easily ignore.
Re:Why should China help US pharma take the lead.. (Score:5, Informative)
If this turns out to be the next break out super-flu like the 1918 variety, every egg laying chicken in the world will be conscripted by every company in the world that can make flu vaccines so we maybe keep the death toll in the mere 100s of millions.
In the meanwhile, it's vital that the few research labs capable of mutating raw flu strains into ones that express the vital proteins while growing well in egg membranes get going. Especially since this is particularly difficult with avian flu strains, they're much more vicious towards chicken eggs.
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Re:Why should China help US pharma take the lead.. (Score:5, Informative)
It's also a very slow process, and each egg produces at most 3 doses. I was appalled with 2 'p's when the FDA tried to deny Protein Sciences [wikipedia.org] a licence with the excuse the old methods were good enough. They use modern biotech, splicing the relevant antigen coding DNA into ... whatever, insect? cells that grow well in bioreactors to quickly mass produce the antigens, as I recall something like 100,000 doses in each run. Something like what they're doing would be the only real hope if we were facing a true death plague.
Re:Why should China help US pharma take the lead.. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's also a very slow process, and each egg produces at most 3 doses. I was appalled with 2 'p's when the FDA tried to deny Protein Sciences [wikipedia.org] a licence with the excuse the old methods were good enough. They use modern biotech, splicing the relevant antigen coding DNA into ... whatever, insect? cells that grow well in bioreactors to quickly mass produce the antigens, as I recall something like 100,000 doses in each run. Something like what they're doing would be the only real hope if we were facing a true death plague.
The FDA is a scam and everyone knows it. It's job is to protect their own jobs first, big pharmas profits second, and Americans a distant third. If they cared about helping Americans we would be able to buy drugs from Canada still.
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If that was allowed, then US drug companies would stop giving Canada's nationalized healthcare system discounts, they can well afford to lose whatever business that would cost for a population of 37 million in favor of the 335 million in the US. Especially seeing as how they and we would like to see them continuing to do drug R&D, which the US market supports since all these other wonderful government single paye
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Canada has one of the highest drug costs in the world, so it isn't like we get much of a discount. The way things are going, we'll be back to pre-NAFTA and manufacturing our own drugs. That will get the pharmaceutical companies attention, which will turn on Trump. Right now they're trying to do the TPP bullshit, but with NAFTA instead.
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Yeah, let's kill the Golden Goose, that trick always works!
Seriously, show us on the doll where the capitalist touched you, for you'd rather have millions of people die year in, year out, until, maybe, some day, Western Civilization manages to reappear, that let any one of them "demand tribute from the sick".
You specifically w
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This is why we should be investing more in modernizing flu vaccine manufacturing. If the next super flu is also highly infectious to chickens, they will be culled and burned.
We already have that.... One of them is a recombinant protein-based technique approved in 2013. As I understand it, the protein-based techniques are supposed to create a more consistent vaccine batch than eggs (due to the intermingling of egg DNA). Plus, some people are allergic to chicken eggs and are unable to take the flue vaccine created using the egg based techniques.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/protec... [cdc.gov]
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Deaths are linked to low weight (not enough fat to survive periods where it's a struggle to keep food down, and low energy to power the immune system) and other modern comforts and treatments.
This was a problem for everyone 100 years ago, and rural Asian (and other) areas today. It would be in China's interest to let the US or other countries develop a vaccine as they stand to lose many, many people.
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Whoa, I sincerely hope you're correct, and the cytokine storm hypothesis for the lethality of the 1918 pandemic is wrong. Erk, assuming the accounts I've read are correct, how does this explain the 1918 strain preferentially killing the younger? Well, for that, there's the hypothesis that the older set had already su
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And wonderful attitude of yours. Great to see that you love killing ppl.
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Sounds fishy, do you have a link for that claim?
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If US pharma ends up charging them more than they can afford while the European labs develop the field tests for half the price and end up manufacturing in China to boot?
Go suck a melon America. China doesn't owe you a living you bunch of free-loaders. Get off your iPhone and TV addictions and do something productive with your time like figuring out clean green energy or something you fat bastards.
Yours,
The rest of the world; Trump edition.
The US invents half the shit, including medicines, invented every year. ROW needs to be more like us, not the other way around.
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You obviously do not have a clue of what you are speaking of.
H7N9 has a 40% mortality rate. More importantly, if you spread around a nation fast, and have ppl getting sick at the same time, you will likely have a massive increase in nosocomial infections, which will lead to large amounts of death. Not 40%. Probably 60-70% (though some 30% from side infections).
And if you think that virus can do no harm, look into WWI as
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It's influenza, it's very hard to keep it from spreading, in 1918-9 even to the most remote Pacific islands. However we'd get warning if the PRC instituted a mass inoculation effort, that's the obvious heads up if any county is about to try a genocide the rest of the world with an infectious bioweapon. Their economy also take a bit of a hit, plus they'd lose a lot of their people from starvation when they couldn't import crude oil and food.
Oh, a
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Lately, it seems like AMerica is becoming like China.
However, if you are talking about trade deals, other than NAFTA, America has not broke any. Everything that Trump has done has not been constrained by treaties. Even with WTO, it has said that if there is more than a 10% difference in trade, that the disadvantaged nation can impose tariffs.
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Breaking the largest trade block in the world by breaking treaties (as if Canada is a security threat) is something especially when the guy breaking them doesn't even know anything. He actually thinks Mexico is the US's largest trade partner and doesn't consider the huge advantage the US has with services negating the couple of percent advantage Canada has in material goods currently.
There's also the softwood treaty that America breaks regularly, driving up housing costs for Americans.
And then there is brin
Re: Yeah. Anybody surprised? (Score:2)
Bullshit Windy (Score:2)
The Steel and aluminium taffifs are against the WTO rules. [theguardian.com]
What 10% difference bullshit are you talking about Windy? You never found it the last few times you claimed it was a rule.
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Trump is angling to get rid of the WTO. They won't bow to his grand overblown hair do.
It's a biological weapon now? (Score:2)
Please don't give it to Trump.
What was the name of this treaty by the way? Sounds interesting.
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Because they wouldn't be able to provide enough vaccine for their own country if it broke out in a big way, unless they've copied approaches like the one used by Protein Scien
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I wouldn't be too sure about any thing the Realty TV personality in charge would do.
Re:Intellectual Property (Score:4, Insightful)
From memory, and what I was just able to look up, there's 3 or so labs in the US that do this, St Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, New York Medical College in Westchester County (maybe the top place, or maybe they just get the best press since a woman runs it), and maybe the CDC, all mustache twirling evil non-profit academic labs.
Your worldview is severely stunted and parochial.
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What an enlightened frame of mind. So if a few thou infants, old people, poor people, etc. die, well that's just to show they aren't average Americans with good nutrition. Hey, you should tell the CDC, they'll be happy for this information...save them a whole lot of trouble and angst. I'm sure they'd listen to you.
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Not hardly. But to the extent our body weights are more than they should be, that might help a lot of our people survive, according to this comment [slashdot.org]:
That being true 100 years ago for most people (1918 pandemic), and today for many Asian populations where high death rates have been observed from bird flu. S
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Depends what they mean by 'low weight' too, how low?